


Blue like sea glass

by RabbitRunnah



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Future Fic, Light Angst, M/M, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 13:07:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15558372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RabbitRunnah/pseuds/RabbitRunnah





	Blue like sea glass

Eric was seven years old and a ring bearer in his Aunt Tracie’s wedding when he heard it for the first time. “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” his slightly older girl cousins chanted as their mamas put bows in their hair and buckled their shoes. “Something old, something new ...” 

“Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” he recited later in their hotel room. His face hurt from smiling at distant relatives and his feet hurt from dancing in last year’s dress shoes and his tummy hurt from eating too much cake, but he couldn’t get the rhyme out of his head. “What’s that mean?” he asked Mama.

Mama smiled and undid his bow tie. “Oh, it’s just an old saying. It’s supposed to bring the bride good luck if she has all those things on her wedding day.”

“What about the groom?”

“Boys don’t need to worry about all that,” Daddy said. “All boys need to worry about is showin’ up.”

“Anyway,” Mama said, “it’s just a superstition. You don’t need luck if you have love.”

After the wedding, they’d driven down the Florida coast and stopped for two days at a little seaside motel. On the beach, he found a blue rock that stood out from the others, smooth and shiny. It looked like a jewel and reminded him of the treasure he’d seen in a picture book about pirates. “What’s this?” he asked Mama.

“That’s sea glass,” she said, and explained how over time, years and years, the sea turned the sharp shards of discarded glass into beautiful rocks. “It’s very valuable. You don’t see this much anymore. Keep it, it could be lucky.”

He kept the small stone clutched in his hand. “Something blue,” he repeated to himself.

 

Eric is reminded of sea glass the first time Jack Zimmermann turns his intense blue eyes on him and grunts out, “Eat more protein.” They are not kind. They do not feel lucky.

 

It takes some time, but eventually there is kindness in those eyes. Kindness, and a different kind of intensity, one reserved just for Eric.

 

Jack signs with the Falconers and graduates and kisses Eric, and then they’re in Madison together. Eric wears Jack’s Falconers-blue baseball cap all over town. It feels like a secret. It _is_ a secret. It’s a secret when they sit in the back of his daddy’s pickup truck, spending just as much time kissing as they do watching the fireworks. It’s a secret when Jack slides into his bed at night and they lie pressed together, falling asleep to the sound of each other’s breathing. It’s a secret when Jack goes back to Providence and leaves his hat on Eric’s pillow. “You forgot your hat,” he tells him when they talk that night. They talk every night, now.

Jack’s eyes are bright on his computer screen. “I didn’t forget it,” he says. “It’s yours.”

 

“Does it scare you, graduating?” Eric and Lardo are supposed to be studying for finals, but he’s scrolling through Twitter and Lardo is idly painting her nails an electric shade of blue called Hello, Officer. Their books sit beside them on the floor, untouched.

“Nah. Maybe if I didn’t have friends who have already gone through it, but Jack and Shitty are doing fine.” She reaches over with her brush and paints a stripe of blue on his big toe. “Let me do the rest,” she says.

He briefly wonders what his daddy would think about a son who gets blue pedicures. Even though it’s not really that different from the time the entire varsity football team allowed the cheerleaders to give them red and black manicures for homecoming week. But it _is_ different, he thinks, when it’s your son who used to skate around in sequins and likes to kiss boys. _A_ boy. He decides it doesn’t matter. Lardo’s halfway finished anyway.

Later, he’s sitting on the couch in Providence, feet in Jack’s lap, when Jack notices. “This is new,” he says.

“Oh, it’s ... Lardo wanted to ... I meant to take it off,” Eric stammers, a little embarrassed.

“I like it,” Jack says. “It’s cute. It suits you.”

Eric searches Jack’s eyes for some sign that he’s teasing.

“You should keep it like this for playoffs. For luck. Do you think she’ll do mine, too?”

Maybe it’s not luck, Eric thinks. Maybe it’s love.

 

They kiss on the ice, and blue and yellow confetti falls down around them.

 

On Eric’s wedding day, his mama knocks on the door to his room as he’s getting ready. “I have something for you,” she says. She pulls a box out of her purse. Inside are a bow tie, a pair of cufflinks, and a piece of blue sea glass — the same one he found on the beach after another wedding so many years ago, and lovingly placed on one of his bedroom shelves when they returned home.

“Jack helped me with the bow tie,” she says as she straightens it around his collar. “That’s your something new. The cufflinks are your daddy’s, from our wedding. They’re old and borrowed.” She presses the sea glass into his palm. “And something blue.”

He keeps his hand curled around the glass and slips it into his pocket just before he walks out to meet Jack at the altar. They enter from opposite sides and meet in the middle. When they say their vows Eric looks into Jack’s eyes and blue is all he sees.

 

Their private bungalow over the water is perfect. It was worth it, to wait until playoffs were over to go on their honeymoon. There was disappointment this year because, as they’ve learned, not every season is a winning season. But Jack kisses him at night, every night, and tells him he’s worth a million Stanley Cups.

He could sit like this all day, one hand around a cold glass with an umbrella in it and the other loosely tangled up with Jack’s.

“I love you,” Eric says, even though it doesn’t need to be said.

Jack squeezes his hand. “I love you, too.”

Eric sits back in his chair and gazes out at the blue blue water. Blue like sea glass, blue like his husband’s eyes.


End file.
